A warm welcome to the Dare Be Podcast where I interview people who have followed their passion and mission. My guest in this episode is Guillaume Liégey, an entrepreneur. He co-founded eXplain, a startup to combine his passion for politics and his desire to work with great people.While at the Harvard Kennedy School, he witnessed how data-driven and field-focused Obama's campaign was. So he decided to bring back to France this best practice. He did it with the French Socialist party in 2012. He then worked closely with Emmanuel Macron to create and launch the En Marche party which won the French presidential election in 2017. Preferring to focus on his business he made the tough decision to withdraw from the campaign and to pivot the business.In this episode Guillaume also talks about the joys and struggles of being an entrepreneur, such as the many nos entrepreneurs have to receive in fundraising, about balancing ambition and ego, about learning humility as a Parisian consultant in a factory in Marseille and much more. I think you'll enjoy this conversation!

A warm welcome to the Dare Be Podcast where I interview people who have followed their passion and mission. My guest in this episode is Anna Molinari, founder of the jewellery brand Atelier Molinari. She shares the pivotal moments in her story of falling in love with art at school and being challenged for it; of the magical trip to the Gem Palace in Jaipur India when she instantly knew she was meant to become a jewellery designer; of the sacrifices she’s had to make for 6 years; of her long, underground learning journey through Jaipur, Paris, London and New York; of the crazy day when the buyer of one of the most prestigious retail stores in the world offered to sell her own jewellery creations. I hope you get inspired by her courage and determination to pursue her dream and make it happen.

In this episode I talk to Grant Aylward who, after a successful sales career in the consumer goods industry, decided to become an actor in London’s West End. It’s been a long journey and he made it all the way to getting lead roles in major musicals such as Mama Mia.  Grant also used his experience as an actor to help business people communicate more effectively. This led him to found High Impact, a leadership and communication consultancy. He then gave up his acting career to dedicate all his attention to the business. I really enjoyed my conversation with Grant and I hope you do too!

In this episode I talk to Chuck de Liedekerke, an investment banker at Morgan Stanley in London turned entrepreneur in regenerative agriculture . I enjoyed learning about regenerative agriculture, how it is a solution to climate change and the difference with organic agriculture.  I also really enjoyed listening to his story. From the evening when he walked into his boss' office to quit to now as CEO of a business with 28 people... A LOT has happened. I was struck by his self-awareness and humility. There are important learnings for all of us. I hope you enjoy it!

Bruce Daisley is the author of the Sunday Times best seller The Joy of Work, host of the number 1 business podcast eat sleep work repeat, a workplace culture expert and an award-winning speaker. He used to be the most senior employee at Twitter outside NA. He worked at Google where he ran YouTube in the UK. I wanted to talk to him because I like the work he does and his takes on workplace culture and also because I was interested in his journey from media and Big Tech to what he does now.  I hope you enjoy my conversation with Bruce where he shares insights into what makes a high-enjoyment and high-performance work culture. You will also hear about his transition, writing a book and launching a podcast while having a high-profile role in a fast-paced organisation like Twitter.

Listen to the story of Andrew MacAskill, a LinkedIn Top Voice. He is also part of LinkedIn's Changemaker Programme set up to help make work a better place. Andrew is also the founder of Executive Career Jump, a career coaching company with the mission of ending career-based misery. In the past two years, he's worked with over 500 people to help them find jobs that are more aligned with who they are.  Andrew's mission is complementary to what I do: as a career coach I help people clarify what they want to do, Andrew helps on the critical step of helping people get the job they want.  We first talk about the state of the workplace, the role LinkedIn is playing in this and then we dive into his story. You will learn about what it feels like to lose one’s job, about what it takes to become an influencer, about starting a passion project as a side hustle and making it your main income, about leveraging LinkedIn when you are job-hunting or recruiting.

An emotional conversation with Emilie about her passion for food, about her childhood memories cooking with her grandmother and about her challenging and successful journey to pursue it.  Emilie changed her career from being in Finance in Paris to working in the food industry. She's now the pastry Executive Chef in a luxury gastronomy brand in Germany.  She explains how her love for food was transmitted as an heritage from her grandparents in her family house in the South of France. She also explains what makes a perfect pain au chocolat.  And of course she tells the story of her transition. She shares what she called her revelation that she got while attending a class at the famous Ducasse school.   How she quit her job to become a pastry teacher herself, the difficulties she had to overcome and the years it took to clarify how she could do what she really wanted to do in food and in pastry.

In this deep, open and rich conversation, Deri Hughes shares how he learnt to take conscious decisions instead of being led by unconscious drivers. He shares some practical tools and techniques. This has deep implications for our careers and our lives.  Deri Hughes has had a rich and diverse career with a focus on strategic consulting. He graduated from Oxford University with a first class degree in organic chemistry. He even went all the way to doing a PhD there. He then started his career at Bain, founded a short-lived company and continued with a few free-lance consulting roles. He then moved on to become the CFO and COO in a strategic consultancy. After this he founded his two companies HoneyComb PS and Explore Consulting where he helps leaders of consulting firms to recruit, train, and develop their teams.  A few months ago he wrote a post on LinkedIn where he very openly talked about his personal difficulties and how he has been working through them. This was a beautiful example of daring to be, daring to show up, with his strengths and vulnerabilities.

Caroline Dewast works in the humanitarian sector, working in crisis situations, conflict zones and natural disasters. Caroline is currently working from Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the UN Refugee Agency. Before this, she worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council and for the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. For her humanitarian work she's lived in the Philippines, Gaza, Peru and Fiji and she's worked in Greece, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria, Cameroon, Myanmar and Bangladesh. I invited Caroline not only because she has followed her purpose with great courage and passion but also because before doing this, she had started her career in London as an architect. She's got a lot to say about what it takes to follow your purpose and about making a career change.

Andreia Mitrea is an edupreneur. She is the Founder and CEO of Colina Learning Centre, a new type of school that blends together child education and adult development. To finally implement her vision of education, it’s been a long and winded journey. She started what looked like a high-power, successful career at Coca Cola. There she wondered why she was the only one to not care about her job. She left to become a stewardess. She then joined her sister’s brand new private school in Romania. Over the course of 10 years they made it a very successful venture, in particular growing enrollment from 6 pupils to 600. She had to leave and she took a break. She clarified her purpose, her vision for education and confronted her fears of failure and not being good enough to found Colina Learning Centre.